


It Hurts to Become

by RoseisaRoseisaRose



Category: Fire Emblem: Fuukasetsugetsu | Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Genre: Gen, Gender-Neutral My Unit | Byleth, Other, POV First Person, Pre-Time Skip, SO, gonna unpack it, mostly just introspection, this plot point is kind of wild and they don't really unpack it
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-02
Updated: 2019-12-02
Packaged: 2021-03-03 14:40:38
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,337
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21649690
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RoseisaRoseisaRose/pseuds/RoseisaRoseisaRose
Summary: "The first thing I felt, after I lost you, was power."Byleth reflects on what it means to become a god - and who they are now that they're more than themselves.A loose narrative + reflection on the events in chapter 10.
Relationships: Dimitri Alexandre Blaiddyd/My Unit | Byleth, My Unit | Byleth & Sothis
Comments: 11
Kudos: 53





	It Hurts to Become

_I said to the the sun  
“Tell me about the big bang”  
The sun said  
“it hurts to become”_

~ Andea Gibson, “[I Sing the Body Electric, Especially When My Power’s Out”](https://ohandreagibson.tumblr.com/ising)

The first thing I felt, after I lost you, was power.

The other emotions would come in time. I’d spent my life feeling as if I didn’t quite know what emotions meant. It wasn’t a question you had to ask when you were a mercenary – when you were a mercenary, you had to follow directions, you had to keep alert, and you had to hold the sharp end of your sword away from you. I’d excelled at those things. You also didn’t ask questions. I’d excelled at that one the most.

But the past year I hadn’t been feeling myself. Which was to say, I had been feeling.

Maybe it was because you had woken up, for some reason, within me. Maybe they were always your emotions and I was always just borrowing them. But I think it had more to do with finally seeing what it meant to let your life be ruled by your heart. My students certainly acted that way. It felt strange to call them students when we were practically the same age, but I was still baffled by the way they acted according to how they felt, the way they cried and panicked and laughed and loved and _felt_ their way through the school year. That was what ultimately separated me from them, I think. The way they felt every tiny thing so deeply. The way I couldn’t seem to feel any thing at all.

It makes sense, then, that my mercenary instincts would pick up on the power first and foremost. I watched you vanish in front of my eyes, your hands dissipating as they touched mine, your arms and legs and face following soon after. I felt nothing on my skin as you glided through me, but inwardly I felt as if fire was rushing through my bloodstream. I felt a heightening of every instinct my mercenary father had trained into me. But beyond that, I felt a strength in my sword arm coursing from fingertips to shoulder blade, a strength that my father had never taught me. It was my first realization that you had not disappeared. You and I, we were the same. My arm felt new because it _was_ new. Because it was yours now, even if it was still my own.

The power to rend the sky in two and step through it. The power to toss soldiers aside as if they were made of rags and stuffing. The power to cut down the monster – I couldn’t even call him human – that had sent you away, that had tried to take everything from me. That was all I thought of in that first half-hour of becoming you, of staying myself.

It was your power, but it was mine. And I loved it. I loved every second of having it. Or maybe you loved every second of having me. How could it be possible to say for sure?

***

The next thing I felt, when I saw the prince, was love.

I’m not sure how much of the actual feeling came from you. You didn’t love the prince, I don’t think. The primary emotion you seemed to have towards the students was annoyance, and perhaps an occasional flash of overprotection – all of us, after all, were so small compared to you. He seemed to annoy you most of all, with his secrecy and his vague allusions to a past you could not access. Or maybe it annoyed you how I followed after him, how I threw myself in danger to protect him, how my actions were foolish and unpredictable whenever he was around.

But you gave me the words, didn’t you? You gave me the understanding that it meant something when you wanted another being near you. It had always meant something when he told me my smile was wonderful. But it wasn’t until the battle was over and he ran to me that I realized what that something was.

How strange, to be in love for so many months and not realize that’s what it was called. How awful and wonderful the feeling in my heart when I saw him. (Is this what a heart is? I thought to myself. It hurts.) I imagine most people realize they’re in love gradually, don’t they? Or peacefully? They give over a piece of themselves little by little, day by day, and the realization is soft and calm and right. I did not have that luxury. I saw him running towards me and the words filled my ears and my chest and my heart, if that’s what you want to call it. I loved him. I always had. But now I knew what that meant.

I barely heard what he said to me. I was too shocked, knowing what love was, wondering where I’d learned it, wondering what happened next. I was still on that last question when your – my – our – newfound power overwhelmed me, the equal and opposite reaction of my surge of power viciously claiming its due on my consciousness. When I fell I wondered if he’d catch me. I wondered if that was what love was, as well. I didn’t actually hear your laughter when he failed to react in time and I hit the ground, but I knew it should have been there.

***

The last thing I felt, when I woke up, was fear.

It happened somewhere between sleeping and waking. Somehow, in those last few hours of becoming, I kept walking to the edge of sleep and then walking back. I felt him carrying me, and he was strong and he was secure and I knew, as I slept or almost-slept, that he loved me. I hadn’t learned what doubt was yet. I just knew that anyone who could hold me so gently, with such care and such worry and such strength, could only love me as I loved them.

The fear came on the heels of that security. It flooded my veins the way the power had; it flooded my heart in place of tenderness. The overwhelming fear, and panic, and anxiety hit me all at once: _I could not save him. I could not protect him. I would lose him, like the others._

‘The others’ was your contribution, I suppose. There was grief from my father, perhaps, but by-and-large I still had the confidence that I could protect those that I loved, an invincibility of youth that was only fueled by the power I’d recently stepped into. But such a headstrong confidence came up hard against a longer, darker, powerless past.

Walking towards the edge of sleep again, I knew he was at my bedside, waiting for me to wake up. I knew he was afraid for me. But he couldn’t possibly be as afraid for me as I was for him. My previous grief had been emptiness; a negation that stretched ahead beyond my comprehension. Now, my fear, my love, crashed into me like waves, unrelenting in their repetition: I couldn’t keep him safe. I would fail him. He would be alone.

He disappeared while I slept, whether shooed away or dragged away or leaving of his own volition I know not. When I next approached the edge of sleep he had been replaced.

When I opened my eyes, someone who had looked so much like you, and now looked so much like me, sat over me. She was singing. She was so much like us.

I looked at her; I heard her song. And I was afraid. I was afraid that I couldn’t protect her. I was afraid of what she had done to me. I was afraid of what would happen, both to her and because of her.

And as I reached out my hand I had already begun to forget which fear was mine and which was yours.

**Author's Note:**

> If you would like to approximate what I think it feels like to meld your soul with a goddess, take a reasonably hot cup of coffee or tea and go stand in a snowbank until you can't feel your fingers anymore. Then chug the tea as fast as possible and you can feel the heat spread through your entire body without actually warming you up that much.
> 
> Anyways!
> 
> I'm trying to write shorter things! So here's a short thing. Where does one go to get those 30-day prompts, those seem useful. Kind of weird to say absolutely nothing in 1000 words instead of saying absolutely nothing in 10,000, but I think I could get used to it.
> 
> I think the scene where Sothis says she'll miss you is really affecting and well done, and the game's script certainly plays around with the idea that Sothis's memories are bleeding into Byleth's mind even before chapter 10. So I wanted to write about that. And I wanted to write about Dimitri, because by this chapter he's still the cheerful noble prince we all know and love but I think by then you know that something is going to go terribly, terribly wrong and that's pretty sad! So here you go, here's some stuff about that, and also about how I'm lowkey terrified of Rhea and her creepy singing.
> 
> Thanks for reading! Probably back to more long stuff next time, but as Sothis would say, this was certainly fun.


End file.
